From skeleton sweets to pop-up coffins, they're deadly serious

The Australian Museum is expecting some weird and wonderful responses when it goes online today to ask people what they think about death.

It wants to know how the bereaved have mourned and memorialised their loved ones and if they have rituals or unusual objects that help them remember the dead.

The questionnaire will also delve into other delicate areas, such as how people wish to be disposed of when they die - would they, for instance, donate their body to science?

The museum's website (www.deathonline.net) will serve a dual purpose: it is a way to gather personal stories and objects for a new exhibition, Death: The Last Taboo, that opens at the museum in April, and it will give the exhibition an online presence once it opens.

The Last Taboo - expected to be as confronting as the museum's Body Art exhibition unveiled in 2000 - will also survey how some of the world's most intriguing cultures and religions, including Zoroastrians, Tibetan monks, Tiwi Islanders and Australian Aborigines, deal with death and its aftermath.");document.write("

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To help navigate such a sensitive subject, the museum's seven-member research team conducted a focus group in April (it has taken about two years to create the exhibition from scratch). It helped the team to refine what it was about death that fascinated people - and also what repulsed them. "We wanted to see how far people were prepared to go," said Adrienne Richards, the exhibition's project manager.

People weren't prepared to go as far as seeing human remains. A human uterus containing an eight-month foetus, brought in from the museum's human evolution gallery, was deemed too much. "Some people wouldn't even look at it," Richards said. And no one wanted to see a child's coffin.

But the group was extremely interested in the more unusual methods used to dispose of the dead - such as exposure to the elements - and associated ceremonies and rituals.

Researcher Jeannine Baker recently travelled to Mexico to document the country's vibrant and elaborate Day of the Dead rituals, which range from decorating altars to dancing in the street to filling shop windows with skeleton-shaped sweets.

"In the exhibition, we're going to couple the Mexican Day of the Dead with other cultures that worship their ancestors and visit cemeteries on a specific day, like the Chinese," Baker said.

"The fact it's so confrontational is really alien to Anglo-Saxon funeral ceremonies, where we put [the body] over there and let someone else deal with it. Even if you view the body, it doesn't look like a real person."

The Last Taboo will source many items from the museum's natural history collections. Researchers have also tracked down convict-era headstones from the Quarantine Station at North Head and some archaic mortuary equipment.

Yet it won't be all serious. The team has built a replica 19th-century "safety coffin" whichallowed the mistakenly interred to alert those above ground via bells and a pop-up flag.

But for the next few months, researchers will trawl through the stories provided by the public.

"The beauty of doing it on the internet is we're going to get responses from around the world," said Baker. "We might find out what an Indian Sikh thinks or an American Baptist, so the possibilities are endless."